High-Rise

Ben Wheatley's High-Rise is based on the 1975 novel of the same name by J.G. Ballard and it is set when Ballard wrote it, in the mid-70s.

Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) is a young doctor attracted to the lifestyle in a new 'modern' high-rise. The tower block is a self-sustaining society created by esteemed architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons) and has everything you could possibly need within its walls. The building has its own shopping market, school, gym, swimming pool etc etc. There is so much included that you would never need to leave and people don't. The only thing missing is perhaps its own police force which, with hindsight, turns out to be a rather large oversight.

The problem is that the building mirrors the wider class system with the upper class at the top, the middle class in the middle and the lower class at the bottom. As ever this builds resentment.

Laing lives on the upper-middle 25th floor where he soon starts to meet some of the other residents. While sunning himself naked on his balcony (as you do), his upstairs neighbour Charlotte (Sienna Miller), who is also Royal's aide, is very keen to introduce herself.

Meanwhile there are a few teething problems with the building. Lifts get stuck, rubbish chutes clog up and there are power outages which only affect the bottom of the building which further upsets the already uneasy peace.

Laing meets Richard Wilder (Luke Evans) and his wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss), Wilder takes it upon himself to make a film exposing the class injustices in the building. Wilder turns out to be a violent man who starts out killing dogs before moving on to people as life in the high-rise quickly begins to degenerate.

 

A patient of Laing’s called Munrow (Augustus Prew), who is told by Laing that he has found ‘something’ in his brain, falls off the high rise in a seemingly drunken escapade. Royal meanwhile seems uninterested as his creation crumbles around him.

Of course you could ask why the residents don’t simply leave instead of sinking into a life of theft, murder, eating dog, 24 hour orgies\rapes and one of the most gruesome pool parties ever seen. Indeed. I suppose a decently priced flat in London was hard to get even in the 70s.

For Laing I suppose his popularity with the ladies helps. He gets with Charlotte first before working his way through many of the female residents until finally gets with Wilder’s Helen who abandons her own children for a tryst with him which does nothing for his already haphazard decorating.

When we are occasionally shown outside the building, the desolate 70s vision that is painted makes the high-rise seem like a haven or is it just a microcosm of society in the 70's that is probably still relevant today. The residents feel trapped not only in the building but also trapped to their individual floors, as their class situation won't allow them to ascend. The only solution, as they see it, is to bring civilisation down and with it the social class structure.

High-Rise is either a brilliant satire on the social classes or incoherent nonsense. You choose. I rather liked it.

War Horse

‘War Horse’ is a children's book by Michael Morpurgo that I wasn’t really aware of until recently. I’m assured it’s a cracking book and that there’s also a rather good stage production of it using life-sized horse puppets. That’s perhaps where it should have stayed.

It appears to be a fanciful tale that perhaps works in those formats, perhaps a cartoon would have worked also but here, where Steven Spielberg tries to tell it as a real story on film, it fails spectacularly.

Yeah it’s got great, well actually overdone, cinematography, loads of dramatic music and an able cast. Sadly they are all asked to play clichéd stereotypes and to work with a script that asks you to suspend belief at the cinema door. Welcome to the equine offspring of a one night stand between ‘Lassie Come Home’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’.

Now I've never trained a horse, but I've trained dogs and simply whispering in their ears what you want them to do doesn’t work. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that it doesn't work with horses either but I suppose I could be wrong.

Then the way the bone hard rock strewn field suddenly becomes ploughable to a foot depth after five minutes of rain was hilarious, almost as hilarious as the plough itself splitting a large rock in two. Again I’m no expert but surely it would be basic farming practice to remove as many of the rocks as possible before you attempt to plough the field? Therefore not making it as hard as possible for your horse, even if that horse does happen to be Joey the wonder horse? The story doesn’t get any less ridiculous from there onwards, very little of it made any sense at all.

Sorry I’m skipping the actual plot here. Farmer Narracott (Peter Mullan), a Boer war veteran (he doesn’t talk about it), buys a thoroughbred horse at a Devon cattle market rather than the usual type of nag you’d use to plough a field with and he uses the family’s rent money to do so. Oops. Commonsense bypass. His missus, Emily Watson, with her brow permanently furrowed (unlike their field) isn’t happy. Cue yet more furrowing of brow. No matter, their teenage son Albert (Jeremy Irvine), occasionally called Albie, trains him, hence the whispering. He names our hero Joey.

Well the field gets ploughed and the crops get sown but then they all destroyed by another freak storm, not unlike the one that got the field ploughed in the first place. Joey gets sold to a captain in the British cavalry (Tom Hiddleston) for use in a suicidal WWI military manoeuvre, so that the rent can be paid.

Once the cavalry have all been slaughtered, Joey ends up in the hands of the Germans where he is cared for by two young brothers, one of whom is only 14 but then presumably after having lied about his age to get in the German army, the pair of them inexplicably decide to desert using the horses to escape. They are captured and shot. Good riddance.

Joey and another horse are now in the hands of a sickly young French girl called Emilie. We only know she’s French because she calls her grandfather ‘grand père’ in a terrible French accent. Joey is only briefly in these pseudo-French hands because soon a group of soldiers with equally bad German accents snatch the horses back. A bit of real foreign language dialogue here would have added a much needed touch of reality and clarity to the proceedings because it’s anybody’s guess what language the ensuing German-French conversation takes place in.

Now Joey the wonder horse visits the Somme circa 1918, where he escapes from the retreating Germans and goes for a gallop across no man’s land, running straight through at least two barbed wire fences... er, no, terribly unlikely. Finally entangled in the wire we get the one great scene of the film as a British and German soldier team up to cut him free from the barbed wire.

Back in the hands of the Brits, Joey is about to be shot because he’s too damaged to save when Albert, himself now fighting and subsequently wounded in the war, recognises his beloved Joey. Quickly the armistice is declared, yet Albert and Joey, suddenly in perfect health again, are set to be parted once more because all the horses are to be auctioned off.

Grand père turns up out of the blue and outbids everyone for the horse, wanting Joey in memory of his granddaughter who has since died. Blimey, ten minutes ago she looked as strong as, well, a horse. Still, it’s a relief of sorts because my partner suspected that she'd resurface later as romantic interest for our Albie. Phew.

I don’t feel guilty spoiling the plot and saying that it all turns out ok in the end because you’d know that from the off. It’s all so inevitable. The more interesting back story was whether Albert's father’s Boer war pennant, which accompanied Joey the whole time, would make it home safely. Thankfully it did.

In the book Joey actually narrates the story (it probably worked better that way around) and it would have been nice for the horse to have said something like ‘That’s All Folks’ at the end to complete the charade but sadly it didn't.

It is, I think, supposed to be a tear jerker and my partner may have shed a few at some point but then she cries in most things and it’s hard not to cry for the horse for putting up with the corny script. Surprisingly the usually able Richard Curtis worked on it. He does reuse what he can from ‘Black Adder Goes Forth’ but even that doesn’t save the film.

I was originally going to say it’s an ok but not great film but the more I think about it, the more terrible it seems. Frankly it was awful, apart from the horse that is, who to be fair, was great, nay, terrific and acts everyone else off the screen. Give that stallion an Oscar and send the rest of them back to the trenches.